CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

Family Farms Face Extinction Without Fair Market Prices

Passage of the 2002 Farm Bill may prove to be the defining moment
for family farm agriculture in our nation's history for the gauntlet
has now been thrown down as to whether family farms are to assert
themselves in an organized grassroots fashion or abdicate their
remaining and dwindling power to corporate agribusiness.

It has been disgusting to see purported grass-roots membership
farm organizations and those groups and organizations that purport to
be the friends of family farmers grovel about for a few legislative
crumbs off the table that were given them by the self-serving
politicians that framed this new legislation.

While "commodityism" and "regionalism" once again reared their
ugly heads in the debate over the legislation, the public, the media
and the politicians were also being fed -- in daisy chain fashion --
a steady diet of anti-subsidy misinformation which not only betrayed
the perpetrators ignorance of farm economics, but heaped scorn upon
the US's already beleaguered farmers from nations near and far
throughout the world.

Throughout this current anti-subsidy propaganda blitzkrieg and
the resulting legislation the organized family farm community
remained shamefully mute. Save for the National Family Farm Coalition
and a few of its local and regional affiliates no group or
organization publicly challenged these subsidy myths that were abroad
in addition to openly opposing the final farm bill that has now been
signed into law by President-select George W. Bush.

This lack of verve and spine not only resulted in farm
legislation that is already doomed to failure, but as policy that
only continues to contribute to an image of farmers and the
communities in which they live as being greedy and absorbed in
self-interest at the expense of the common good.

The result has been a public relations disaster for family farm
agriculture, in addition to successfully playing into the hands of
corporate agribusiness in its century-old campaign to rid agriculture
of its "excess human resources."

As Keith Mudd, a farmer near Monroe City, Mo., so succinctly
framed the current farm subsidy question, "regardless of where the
income comes from, larger farmers will have the funds to buy out
smaller neighbors. Therefore, it is not the subsidy that allows the
larger farmers to buy out their smaller neighbor, it is the system.
If Cargill and ADM had to pay for our production, the subsidy would
not be necessary. If commodity prices were higher, farmers would make
money from farming, would be less inclined to quit and would reduce
the opportunity to expand farm size."

Mudd's analysis is the type of message that the public needs to
hear with the same regularity that it has been subjected to by those
who believe that "subsidies" are the "evil-doers" in agriculture.

Today, any family farm policy worth considering requires that two
related and fundamental issues need to be enunciated in a clear and
unequivocal voice as family farm agriculture seeks to speak truth to
corporate power, i.e. a fair market price paid to farmers for what
they produce and meticulous consideration as to the consequences of
corporate concentration in agriculture and our food system.

It is incumbent, therefore, that family farm agriculture become
focused on these two elementary issues and that in setting out an
agenda to educate the public, the media and most importantly our
elected representatives that it seeks every possible contrivance to
bring these two issues constantly into the mainstream of public
dialogue when it comes to the question of farm and food policy. Thus,
through constant and unrelenting educational efforts we need to
marshall those facts in a way that they become both clear and
unambiguous.

Relative to the market price issue, it bears constant repeating,
the words of former Texas Agricultural Commissioner Jim Hightower,
chairman of the Democratic National Committee's Agricultural Council
in 1984, when he chaired a series of eight nationwide farm policy
forums on agriculture and concluded in his final report:

"When all was said and done, it came down to one word: Price.
Other important issues were discussed at the forums sponsored by the
DNCAC during the past six months, but the overwhelming consensus
among participating farmers was that the other concerns --
overproduction, soil and water conservation, high interest rates,
lack of credit, entry by young farmers, the depressed farm service
industry, and the farm program's high cost, to name a few -- could
and would be solved when farmers received a fair price for their
products."

Thus, no matter what the agriculture-related issue from
conservation to country-of-origin food labeling, family farm
activists need to constantly return to the question of price and how
an equitable market price for farmers can be achieved. That issue can
be approached from several different angles, but somewhere in that
mix there are a few essential matters that need to be addressed.

First, today's reality of just what constitutes an efficient
family farm needs to be made clear. Again, as Mudd reminds us, "The
Environmental Working Group argues that most of the subsidies go to
the largest of farmers, who in turn use it to buy out their smaller
neighbors. The truth is that all farmers, regardless of size, must
use the subsidy just to raise the value received for their commodity
above the cost of production. In most instances, the cost of
production is covered and something is left over for living expenses.
In practically no instance is anything left over that would be
considered a return on investment (land and equity)."

In conjunction with an effort to determine just who is a family
farm farmer and who isn't there is also the need for both regional
and national full cost, life-cycle accounting and pricing studies for
sustainable development agriculture. Not only would this allow people
to more clearly understand the costs and what happens to their food
before it leaves the farm gate, but it would go a long way toward
dispelling the myth that the United States enjoys the cheapest food
per capita of any nation on earth, when in fact our food system is
replete with hidden economic, social, health, political and
environmental costs.

The vast majority of those costs are now being borne by the
public in general in various and sundry ways, ways which need to be
shorn of their sophistry and laid bare as lies and deceit. In doing
so the culprits, the propagators of such lies and deceit, those who
A.C. Townley -- co-founder of the Non-Partisan League -- referred to
as "the gamblers in the necessities of life," need to be held up to
public scrutiny, warts and all!

By taking this approach we can demonstrate that the issue of a
fair market price neatly folds into the second major issue that needs
our immediate and carefully documented attention -- market
concentration -- along with its many and varied forms and its
resulting anti-competitive and anti-democratic consequences.

Clearly, these issues of a fair market price for agricultural
commodities and increasing concentration must be joined together in
not only a way that people can come to unequivocally understand, but
that are shown as two cuts from the same cloth. To allow ourselves to
be sidetracked by a lot of relative extraneous issues is only to play
into the hands of our adversaries and divert our attention from the
goal of achieving lasting social and economic justice in the context
of the common good.

In short, as agrarian populist activists, we need to be the
framers of our own arguments for economic and political democracy and
not simply be placed on the defensive all the time or become
entrapped in the classic "liberal dilemma." For, as Hightower has so
straightforwardly put it, "we need to stop being progressives, and
become aggressives!"

At the same time we also need to say to our well-meaning, but
often single-minded colleagues, and to our sometimes apathetic,
sometime passive farm neighbors -- if you are not going to be part of
the solution, then you are indeed part of the problem!

There is no question that there are myriad agricultural and
environmental issues facing us as a nation. But until we can
authoritatively show that the system's issues are not the issue, but
that THE issue is the system itself we will continue to see in
agriculture unfair prices for farmers, more market concentration, and
consumers forced to play Russian roulette with their own health and
welfare and that of their families every time they shop for their
food.